Mahmud Abouhalima

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Mahmud Abouhalima (Arabic: محمد أبو حليمه ) (born 1959) is a convicted perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing. His red hair earned him the nickname Mahmud the Red.[1]

Born to a mill foreman in Kafr Dawar, Egypt, Abouhalima spent his adolescence with the Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, an outlawed Islamic group that heralded Omar Abdel Rahman as their spiritual leader. He briefly attended Alexandria University, but dropped out and left Egypt altogether in 1981.

The following year, Germany denied him political asylum and he quickly married Renate Soika, a troubled German woman, which guaranteed he could remain in the country. He divorced Soika three years later, but shortly after he married another woman named Marianne Weber in an Muslim ceremony. He flew to Brooklyn with his new wife and after his American tourist visa expired, applied for amnesty claiming to be an agricultural worker and was accepted as a permanent resident under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

He worked as a New York cabdriver for five years from 1986-1991, though he saw his license suspended ten times during that period, for failing to attend traffic court for cab violations including traffic violations and an attempt to overcharge a customer.

In his free time, Abouhalima worked long hours for a non-profit group in Brooklyn that raised money for the Afghan Mujahideen. Abouhalima himself travelled to Pakistan several times, including receiving combat-training in Peshawar.

He was the subject of an FBI investigation through January 1993, at which point the investigation was called off, shortly before the World Trade Center bombing. On February 26, 1993, the day of the WTC bombing, he was seen by several witnesses with Mohammed A. Salameh at the Jersey City storage facility allegedly used to prepare the explosives.

Abouhalima fled to Saudi Arabia, and then back to his native Egypt where he was captured by Egyptian police and extradited to the United States to stand trial for the bombing. In March 1994, he received a sentence of 240 years in prison with no possibility of parole.